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Youth unemployment remains around 20% within the UK and across the OECD. A key challenge facing young people is that they are lacking the experience to enable them to successfully compete for jobs in a tight labour market. 

The recent announcement of “Youth on the Move” by the European Commission has highlighted the challenge we have in Europe to help our young people into work. This is a major issue in the UK with 950,000 unemployed young people, a 20% youth unemployment rate. Older workers have traded down to lower skilled jobs during the economic crisis, displacing young people with less experience.

With UK unemployment reaching 2.5m and 77% of all jobs requiring digital skills, we launched Britain Works in September 2009 to help 500,000 people get jobs through IT skills training by 2012.